Cairo Genizah : Letter

Cairo Genizah

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Testimony from a group of India traders reporting that they had arrived in Aden to find a Persian man claiming to be of the house of David (a Nasi) with the right to assume authority, and that the local people had conceded jurisdiction to him over all the synagogues in the country. It also reports that previously public prayers had been said for the Exilarch of Baghdad and Gaʾon Maṣliaḥ of Cairo, but that this had changed after the arrival of the ‘Nasi’ who claimed to be the Exilarch’s local representative. Dated 1134 CE. It also reports some minutiae of personal and community life: a visitor from Ṣaʿda in northern Yemen is honoured by an invitation to lead the Aden community in prayer, an India trader’s illness in Qūṣ (Upper Egypt) has forced him to give up his voyage and return to Fusṭāṭ, and an incident is described where in a group of arguing notables, one notable hit another’s knee with his fan.</p>